Children at War examines the use of children as soldiers in more than three-quarters of the world's conflict. P.W. Singer, an internationally recognized expert on 21st-century warfare, shows how changes in weapons technology, combined with a breakdown of global order, have made this new kind of war possible. Singer's book looks at how children have been used in the war on terror, how they have been indoctrinated to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, how Saddam Hussein created the "Ashbal Saddam" (Saddam's Lion Cubs) made up of boys between the ages of 10 and 15, and how the Taliban came to power in the Afghan civil war by raiding Pakistani madrassahs (Islamic Schools) and taking young refugees as soldiers. The author calls on Western armies to prepare themselves for facing children in battle and makes clear how we can reverse this horrific phenomenon.

P. W. Singer

Peter Warren Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. He is the youngest scholar named Senior Fellow in Brookings's 90-year history. In 2005, CNN named him to their "New Guard" List of the Next Generation of Newsmakers. Singer has also been recognized by the Financial Times as "Guru of the Week" for the thinker who most influenced the world that week and by Slate Magazine for "Quote of the Day."

In his personal capacity, Singer served as coordinator of the Obama-08 campaign’s defense policy task force. In 2009, Singer was named by Foreign Policy Magazine to the Top 100 Global Thinkers List, of the people whose ideas most influenced the world that year.

Dr. Singer is considered one of the world's leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare. He was named by the President to Joint Forces Command's Transformation Advisory Group. He has written for the full range of major media and journals, including the Boston Globe, L.A. Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Current History, Survival, International Security, Parameters, Weltpolitik, and the World Policy Journal.

He has been quoted in every major U.S. newspaper and news magazine and delivered talks at venues ranging from the U.S. Congress to over 40 universities around the world. He has provided commentary on military affairs for nearly every major TV and radio outlet, including ABC-Nightline, Al Jazeera, BBC, CBS-60 Minutes, CNN, FOX, NPR, and the NBC Today Show. He is also a founder and organizer of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a global conference that brings together leaders from across the US and the Muslim world.

Dr. Singer’s most recent book, Wired for War (Penguin, 2009), looks at the implications of robotics and other new technologies for war, politics, ethics, and law in the 21st century. Described as: “An exhaustively researched book, enlivened by examples from popular culture" by the Associated Press and “awesome” by Jon Stewart of the "Daily Show," Wired for War made the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list in its first week of release. It was named a non-fiction Book of the Year by The Financial Times. It has already been featured in the video game "Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot," the CBS "Late Late Show,” as well as in over 75 presentations at venues as diverse as all three US military academies, the US Congress, the National Student Leadership Conference, and the royal court of the United Arab Emirates. The book is also been made an official reading with organizations that range from National Defense University, US Air Force, US Navy, to the Royal Australian Navy.

Prior to his current position, Dr. Singer was the founding Director of the Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World in the Saban Center at Brookings. He has also worked for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Balkans Task Force in the U.S. Department of Defense, and the International Peace Academy. Singer received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

This evening's Meet The Author Program features Dr. P.W. Singer, author of ChildrenAt War. In this book, Dr. Singer explores the use of children as soldiers in more than 3/4of the world's conflicts. He calls on Western armies to prepare themselves for facingchildren in battle, and he makes clear how we can reverse this horrible phenomena. Dr.Singer is the National Security Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at theBrookings Institution, and is the director of the Brookings Project on Foreign Policy tothe Islamic World. He has also authored earlier book: Corporate Warriors: The Rise ofthe Privatized Military Industry. Prior to his current position, Dr. Singer was a Fellow ofthe Belford Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, he has also workedfor the Balkans Task Force in the U.S. Department of Defense, Duke University, and theInternational Excuse me, almost done... Dr. Singer has served as anadvisor to the U.S. military on child soldiers and his articles have appeared in numerousnewspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, andForeign Affairs. Dr. Singer attended the Woodrow Wilson School of Public andInternational Affairs at Princeton and received his Ph.D. in Government from HarvardUniversity. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Singer.Thank you for having me. For this dark topic, on a dark evening, I thought it might bebest to start with a quote. This is from a 16 year old from West Africa. 'I was attendingprimary school. The rebels came and attacked us. They killed my mother and my fatherin front of my eyes. I was 10 years old. They took me with them. They trained us to fight.The first time I killed someone I got so sick I thought I was going to die, but I got better.My fighting name was Blood Never Dry." Now, as our moderator mentioned, myresearch is on changes in warfare, particularly the rise of new conflict groups with thefirst book looking at the rise of private corporations engaged in warfare, and this booklooking at the new rise of child soldier groups. This one in particular is oftenheartrending, but a necessary work, and I thought Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the NobelPeace Prize winner, put it best, "It is immoral that adults should want their children tofight their wars for them. There is simply no excuse, no acceptable argument for armingchildren." There may be no moral excuse, but the reality of contemporary warfare is thatit's happening and that it's growing. And so what this book attempts to do is take the firstcomprehensive look at the practice of child soldiers: the causes, the dynamics, theimplications, and finally the solutions. And in the book I try to leverage lessons fromeverything from military history, to neuropsychology, and also carried out a series ofinterviews for it, interviewing everything from child soldiers in places ranging fromBosnia to Africa to Colombia, to those who had fought child soldiers, includingmercenaries who'd been hired to fight them. And I really wanted to accomplish threethings with this book. The first was to simply tell a story. This was such a compellingtopic that you feel obligated to spread the word, to spread the message about somethingthat isn't all that well known. The second is to do so in a manner that finally lays out thetrue hows and whys of it with the thinking that if we understand it then we can developbetter solutions, more realistic solutions that will be effective. And then finally, I wantedto take this issue beyond just the pure tragedy of the topic and apply a new lens on it,with the idea that if we understand it as more than just a tragedy with something that hasreal implications for our own security and global security, then it adds to the mandate totake action, particularly in this day and age when the new coin of the realm in politicalterms is security. And since we haven't seen enough action out of our own obligation, ourown sense of reality, then maybe we'll do something more if we understand it as a threatas well. So what I'd like to do today is give you in a sense a short rundown of some of thecauses of where this has come from, briefly some of the implications, and then some ofthe responses we can make for it, and then I'm looking forward to a good conversationwith you. Now, one of the things to know about these child soldiers is that throughout thelast 4,000 years of human history what we have of recorded warfare, children were, ineffect, footnotes in warfare, both as victims and as participants. There simply wasn't aconnection there. There were isolated instances, for example, you had the drummer boyswho marched in front of Napoleonic armies and civil war regiments. You had the powdermonkeys who were basically young boys who ran ammunition back and forth in oldsailing ships. Even in our own civil war, you have one battle, the Battle of Newmarketwhich had a small regimen of 230 cadets from Virginia Military Institute who fought inthat battle. But over all, these were footnotes. They weren't a global practice. What we'reseeing today though is a shift, a major shift, and we're seeing a global use of childsoldiers in a way that we've never seen before, and there's three causes of this, threedynamics that have come together to cause this shift. The first is, in effect, we'reexperiencing a lost generation right now. On one hand, we're living through the mostprosperous generation in human history. On the other hand, we're leaving people behind,and in particular we're leaving many children behind. All the world's troubles falltoughest upon children, and that's everything from the 25 million children that arerefugees or internally displaced persons, the more than 250 million children who live inabsolute poverty or are homeless, and this new rising generation of orphans that havebeen created by cycles of conflict, but now also AIDS, and this is something that we'reparticularly seeing in Africa. By the year 2010, it's estimated that at least 40 million kidswill have lost either one or both parents to AIDS. So we're seeing generationaldisconnections. The second though, and this is the difference maker, is that now becauseof changes in warfare itself, in particular the technology of warfare, this pool of newpotential candidates for war is now accessible. Basically, the technology of war shiftedfrom being just about brute force, or technology that required years of training to becomeeffective, to now we're in a period where, you speak to a ten year old in one of thesegroups, they learned how to use an AK-47 in under 30 minutes, and more importantlythat same 10 year old has the same lethality, has the same power with that AK-47 as acivil war regiment had. So they may not be as effective as the U.S. soldier right now, butthey certainly can cause chaos and cause this is one of these shifts. Finally, is the contextthat's taking place. WE live in an era of failed states. We live in an era of conflictentrepreneurs. WE live in the era of wars that are driven not by politics but by things asminute as a diamond, and so within this context, warlords look at children as a low costand easy way to generate force and to reach out and get their own goals. And I thinkthere's a good example of this, is that episode of Charles Taylor. Charles Taylor wasa Liberian who was an escaped convict from Plymouth Prison in Massachusetts. He wentback home and on Christmas Eve 1989, he gathered a small force around him of less than100 guys and he invaded his home country, crossed the border and invaded it. No onenoticed his invasion because it was so small. No one in the capital even knew they werebeing invaded, but over the next couple years, Charles Taylor's group abducted childrenand also persuaded children to join them. They targeted places like orphanages and thenthey also made fantastic promises to children, taking advantage of their gullibility, tellingkids, "If you join our war, you'll get a Mercedes-Benz at the end of it, or you'll get ahome computer at the end of it." So soon Taylor built out his force into thousands, and ina couple years of his invasion, he was soon at the head of what was known as Taylorland.Taylorland was this warlord enclave where he was pulling in a personal profit of 300million dollars a year, primarily through the illegal timber trade, and I should add, timbertrade with Western states, including many U.S. corporations. One estimate was at thetime about 14 percent of the furniture, the wood used in furniture in the U.S., was comingthrough Taylorland. Within a couple years, Taylorland expanded to the point that he wonthe war and he became President of Liberia, so through the use of child soldiers, thisescaped convict became a king. What we're seeing, therefore, is a global spread of childsoldiers. The numbers are damning, there's no other way to put it. There's more than300,000 juveniles fighting in wars right now. They're fighting in over 40 percent of theworld's armed organizations, when you take the list of all the armies, terrorist groups,drug cartels, you name it, 40 percent of them use children under the age of 18. 20 percentof them use children under the age of 12. They fight in over 75 percent of the world'swars. Child soldiers have fought on every single continent but Antarctica. So we have aglobal practice, something that is not just a footnote of history, but now wars simply havechildren in them, it's almost an inevitable aspect of it right now. Now, sometimes peopletend to focus on the differences in culture ands ay, well, aren't we really talking aboutkids in our context, but someone that's considered an adult elsewhere? And it's importantto say here, no. Clearly, No. The first is international law says that anyone under the ageof 18 is a juvenile, and in fact, it's the most widely signed international law. Over 190different countries have signed onto that. 18 is also the age in which all the differentnations of the world decide to award different political rights, for example, free educationor free health care, you name it. We treat our prisoners different whether they're under orover 18. One of the important things to note is that it's also been true throughout history.For example going back to ancient Greece, to even tribes like the Zulu, had a cutoffperiod that ranged between 18 and 20 before someone was allowed to serve as a warrior.The use of someone under that age is new, and more importantly, we're not just talkingabout 17 1/2 year olds. Two separate surveys found the average ages to be between 12and 13. The youngest recorded was a five year old in Uganda. The youngest recordedterrorist was a 7 year old in Colombia, so we're talking about juveniles that no one woulddeny is a child, and no one would deny should not be in warfare. It's also important tonote that this is not just something that's taking place in Africa, and not just taking placein areas that we don't care about. Every single site the U.S. forces have deployed to since9/11, we've not only come in contact with child soldiers, we've fought child soldiers.Little discussed is the fact that the very first U.S. combat casualty in the war on terrorismwas a Green Beret sergeant that was killed by a 14-year-old sniper in Afghanistan. Morerecently, U.S. forces in Afghanistan picked up a twelve-year-old who'd been part of anambush on U.S. forces there. In Iraq, it's far more significant than the non-coverage thatit's gotten so far. During the invasion U.S. forces fought child soldiers in 3 differentcities, however during the insurgency it's truly grown, and perhaps the best indicator ofthat was the very same week that President Bush made his mission accomplished speechon the aircraft carrier, in the city of Mosul, U.S. Marines came under fire from an Iraqi 12year old who was using an AK-47 on them, and these incidents have proliferated. Allthree broad insurgent categories in Iraq have used child soldiers and use them today. Youhave the post-Sadaam Baathist groups that have particularly tapped into an organizationknown as Ashpal(sp?)-Saddam, or Saddam's Lion Cubs, which was a training programduring the regime years that trained young boys between the ages of 10 to 15 in the use ofsmall arms and political indoctrination, but also in the radical Shi'a sectors, we've seenthe use of child soldiers, particularly, as well. For example in fighting in Najaf severalmonths ago, the Nati (sp) Army that was organized by Mochtet(sp?) Ar-Sadr not onlyused child soldiers, but their spokesperson trumpeted their use of them, proudlyproclaimed their use of them and said that this was evidence that the fact that they were apopular army, that they had not only old men out there fighting for them but they also had12 year olds fighting for them. Finally it's also particularly happening in what's known asthe Sunni Triangle, and in fighting in Fallujah just a couple months ago the block toblock fighting there, the U.S. Marines discussed the unique challenges of fighting against"children armed with assault rifles". So this is something that we have to deal with backhome because our soldiers in the field have to deal with it. I should add that there's also aterror side to this as well. Al-Qaeda training videos have shown the training of youngboys, at Guantanamo Bay we hold six under-16 year olds in a separate complex from themain campus known as Camp X-Ray, but there's a separate complex known as CampIguana, and we've also seen the use of child soldiers in other aspects of terrorism, forexample, in Israel-Palestine since 2000, more than 30 children have been used as suicidebombers. Now the implications of this are obviously not good, and there's really fourthings that come together here. The first is that this new doctrine, this new way of usingchildren in war is not only more tragic but it means that wars are easier to start. Itchanges the barriers to entry in conflict, and so we're finding organizations that wouldotherwise wither on the vine able to recruit and pull in children, and this is true in tons of,for example, the Charles Taylor example, but also we're seeing state armies throwing outchildren on the front lines when they're losing to give their men breathing space, torecruit, that was the case in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The second thing is itmeans that wars are harder to end, and so they repeat over and over again, just when youthink you have an organization defeated, if a small core of it escapes, the adults escape,then they can regroup in the jungle, recruit, and come back, and so for example in SierraLeone, the rebel force there was known as the RUF, the Revolutionary United Front,which many people have heard about because of it's particularly cruel tactic of cutting offthe hands of civilians in its area. Their group was absolutely trounced twice, the first timeby a private military company, and the second time by a peacekeeping force. In bothinstances, its core adult leaders escaped and regenerated it from a couple hundred back to10,000. The third thing to worry about is that now we're seeing wars without ideology.We're seeing wars where the followers, the line soldiers, don't have the same intent asthe leaders, and in fact, you're seeing wars that are driven by personal profit, or we'reseeing wars that don't make any sense at all, and probably the worst example of this is inNorthern Uganda. There's an organization known as the Lords Resistance Army, and it'sled by a fellow named Joseph Coney. Joseph Coney thinks he's the reincarnation of theChristian Holy Spirit. He has about 200 adult followers, and under his interpretation ofChristianity, sex slaves are allowed, but riding bicycles are not. He's taken these twohundred adult followers and through the years abducted more than 14,000 children andfought a 10-year civil war that's left over a half million people homeless and killedbetween 25-to 100,000 people. So what we're talking about is a cult leader that shouldhave been the equivalent of a David Koresh, instead is a viable conflict actor, someonewho has operated in a civil war, caused civil war that goes on today. The final thing isthat these wars are now more tragic, and not just in terms of the fact that children areinvolved, but the fact that the casualties in these wars, and the atrocities in these wars aremuch higher than in other wars. One of the disturbing statistics that comes out oft his, forexample, is that in Sierra Leone, more than 50, actually the exact number was 53 percentof the women that came into contact with the rebel force that used child soldiers, 53percent of them experienced rape or some form of sexual abuse. Now not even theBosnian-Serb rape camps achieved that level of efficiency, that dark level of efficiency.And so you can obviously see the consequences for a society when this is happening, butthen the other thing to remember is that children are not just perpetrators of violence, butat the same time they're victims of violence, and so beyond just the numbers, what you'reseeing is in effect a destruction of childhood itself. You're taking someone in the periodwhere their identity is being formed, where they're developing their own codes ofmorality and putting them into an environment where it turns that on its head, wherekilling is not only sanctioned, in fact, it's enforced. And so that obviously causes long-term effects. The best parallel is that these children are suffering from the worst form, orthe political form of child abuse, much like other forms of child abuse, it will affect themfor the rest of their lives, and more importantly affect the rest of their society as well.And if they don't get the support they need, we see a conflict merry-go-round; we seecycles of violence happening over and over again, like we've seen in West Africa, forexample. So, what do we do? How do we deal with this? Well, the take that I have on it isthat so far we haven't been all that effective. For all the good intent in dealing with thisissue over the last decade, it's only grown. It's only gotten worse, and that's because wehaven't dealt with the underlying causes, and we haven't dealt with the way that it reallyworks out, and what I think we need to do is understand it as a process and deal with it ateach stage of the process. So the first is we need to develop a system of prevention anddeterrence, and what we've done so far is taken the strategy of trying to shame theshameless. Basically, we've tried to reach out to conflict group leaders and tell them,"Did you know that using children is wrong?" Well, they know it's wrong, and they tryand hide it, and in fact, the best example is the way they try and deal with not just hidingit currently, but the way that history looks at it, for example, in Sri Lanka, the TamilTigers there, the cemeteries don't have the birth date of the children that are killed,because they know history will look back on them and judge them fort his, so we can'ttry and just shame these groups into doing it. First we have to deal with the underlyingcauses, so for example, the things that are causing global poverty, the spread of AIDSthat's leading to this generation of orphans. The spread of light weapons around theworld, the proliferation, we have to do something about these and be more effective, andunfortunately in many cases the U.S. has been in many cases on the wrong side of this asan example, when we tried to have an international treaty to prevent the spread of lightweapons, the illegal spread of light weapons to warlord groups, the U.S. and in thisinstance our allies of communist China and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, tried to block it. Ithink we know by the fact that if those groups were allies, we were on the wrong side.Secondly, though, we need to shift the advantages and disadvantages of this program.Basically, conflict group leaders have only seen the good side of it to them, they've onlyseen that this is a way of them to gain power. We have to start exacting some cost from it,we have to go out there and prosecute these leaders, including indicting them even whenwe don't have them to let them know that we're watching and ultimately they will beprosecuted, butt here's some situation where we might not be able to get our hands onthese leaders themselves, so we have to go after their enablers, the people that supportthem ant put them in a position for them to profit from this misuse, and that includescompanies that are doing so, and I think the best model here is the way we dealt with theapartheid regime. We didn't just go after apartheid in South Africa in terms of thegovernment. We went after the companies that supported it. Secondly, we have to dealwith the consequences within war itself. We can't continue to look at war as something inthe way that we wish it was, we have to face up to what the reality is, and we're not doingthat for our troops right now. They're not getting the type of equipment, the type oftraining, and the type of intelligence support that they deserve, and I'll give you twoexamples of that, the first was last year, U.S. Marines were ready to go into Liberia. I gotan e-mail from one of them, an officer onboard one of the ships offshore, and he said,"We've heard, we've seen on the news, that there's a lot of child soldiers in Liberia. Canyou tell us something about them?" And I emailed him back and said, "It's not just a lot,60 percent of the soldiers on the ground are children, in fact, the one that I covered thereis from Liberia. So if 60 percent of the soldiers had blue skin it would be important toprepare for them." And he replied that they'd gotten nothing from D.C. on what to do,where they were coming from, et cetera... So I sent him a copy of the book, that'sobviously not the way they're supposed to work, now. Another example in terms of notgiving them the equipment they need, U.S. soldiers in Iraq have talked about thedilemmas about being fired upon by child soldiers and not having any other optionsexcept for them to call out to them to stop, and if that doesn't work, to shoot to kill, andwhat they would like is to have non-lethal weapons, to give them an added tool in theirkit, doesn't mean take away their rifles but gives them a choice of something to use.Unfortunately, the armchair generals back in D.C. haven't chosen to support them in thisway, and out of the entire U.S. military we only have 60 non-lethal weapons sets. Wesent 6 to Iraq. That's not the kind of support that our troops deserve. Finally, we have todeal with the consequences of this. We have to help turn child soldiers back into children.And this really comes down to resourcing. We're not giving the kind of aid and supportto this issue, and we're not paying enough attention to this issue to end it, and the result isthat we're seeing conflict cycles, and you see this and when you visit the camps, it's kidssleeping 20 to a room, but also kids sleeping in the hallways, and the peacekeepingoperation in Sierra Leone, where you had something like 15,000 child soldiers, the U.N.sent one child psychologist for the U.S. in Afghanistan, where we've not only beenfighting child soldiers but capturing child soldiers, there is an estimated 8,000 childsoldiers that were fighting for the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. At the end of thatwar it took us two years before we even thought about funding a rehabilitation program,so two years in which we allowed warlords to tap into those 8,000 kids. That's not theway it's supposed to be, and again, we don't have to act just on moral values alone,which should be enough, but unfortunately it hasn't been, but also, these are very realsecurity issues. So, I'm going to end here, and really, thank you for coming out on thisrainy evening to hear about a pretty dark topic, but obviously I think it's a topic that iscompelling, and it's something we have to deal with, and the take away for me is thatthroughout human history, there's been many practices in warfare that we look back onand can't even understand how they were used, they were so evil. For example, it wasonce considered totally acceptable for the prisoners that you capture to become yourpersonal slave, or just 100 years ago, it was considered an obligation for states to go outand invade other nations to lift them up, it was white man's burden to carry out this kindof imperialism. Now, these practices have gone by the wayside of history, so hopefullyone day we'll look back at this period as a blip on history, a period when the morality andthe codes of warfare broke down, but we restored them. But that won't happen until wematch the will of those who recruit children to do their evil deeds with our own will to do good. Thank you.